“Boss and the hands are gone. Now get gone yourself.”
“What would you say if I told you your boss and his gang of bandits wasn’t coming back?”
“I’d say good riddance to bad trash. Are you telling me this is true?”
Craig nodded. “Saw it happen myself. Both groups got ambushed trying to ambush people on I-70, up north.”
“Serves ‘em right. My boy was one of them, but he turned into a bad’un. I’ll grieve, I guess. But not right now. What do you think would happen if I took the only horse left in the stable and took off? Maybe taking a few things for back pay?”
“I’m not going to stop you,” Craig said.
“You lend a hand? I can’t get a saddle on that old nag by myself.”
Craig smiled at the woman’s matter-of-fact approach to the news. “You gather up what’s yours and I’ll get the horse saddled.”
Not totally convinced of her innocence, Craig made sure not to turn his back on her, and kept a sharp eye out as he found the horse and saddle in the large barn. He could see why the horse was still in the barn. It was ready for the glue factory. It was a shame. It looked like it had been a good horse at one time. The woman would be lucky to get where she was going on it.
The saddle wasn’t much better than the horse, but use it, Craig did. He had the horse saddled up in a few minutes and had it tied to the rail of the front porch of the house. It was only a few minutes later that the woman came out of the house carrying two loaded pillow cases and a battered old suitcase.
She was also wearing a gunbelt over her dress that held a holstered single action pistol that looked much like the horse and saddle. But the brass of the shells in the loops on the gun belt gleamed brightly. If that was what she wanted, so be it. Craig wasn’t her keeper. He was still pretty sure she’d been a part of the operation, even if that was only acting as gardener, cook, and housekeeper.
“You riding with me?” she asked as she brought the horse closer to the porch so she could step in the saddle from its height.
“No, Ma’am,” Craig said. “I plan to hang here a few days and rest up before I continue on my way.”
“Good luck to ya, Cowboy. This is an evil place and you’d be well put to leave it as soon as you can.”
Craig nodded, but he stood there and watched her ride away. He gave it a few hours and then went to get the other horses. There was enough grain in the stable to give the horses all a good bait.
There wasn’t much in the barn when Craig looked it over in more detail. Same with the bunkhouse. Besides wanting to make sure there wasn’t someone hiding out in it, Craig wanted to check it for trade goods. He figured it was all part of the spoils-of-war.
Craig had a feeling that the members of the gang didn’t trust each other much. There wasn’t much in the bunkhouse worth having. Some clothes that would fit him, that would need to be boiled before being worn, but that was about it.
Like the barn, the house wasn’t in good shape. The woman… Craig suddenly realized he didn’t know her name. She hadn’t even asked his. The woman might have tried to keep up the large rambling ranch house, but it was much the worse for wear and lack of care.
Craig checked the kitchen. Seeing the empty shelves, he was pretty sure the woman had cleaned out all the food she could carry. There was still a sack of flour and a few jars of home canned beans. The flour was infested with worms and at least one of the jars of beans was showing some bubbles. Not a good sign. Craig brought his own food in to prepare supper.
He’d looked the house over quickly after the woman left, before he lost the light and picked the bedroom he would use. It was cleaner than the rest, though the smallest of the rooms in the house. Craig guessed it was the one the woman had used. There was a pair of good deadlock bolts on the inside of the door and closed and locked-on-the-inside shutters on the lone window.
Craig made up the bed with clean linens he found in the tiny closet, after checking the bed for bugs. It was clean. He left the detail inspection of the house for the next day. His sleep was restless. He didn’t actually like being locked inside a room, even if the locks were on his side of the door and window.
Still a bit tired the next morning, Craig was up early and took a cautious look around the house and property again before he checked the horses and then fixed himself breakfast. Then, not expecting to find anything, Craig searched the house with a fine tooth comb, just in case. Bandits were like pirates. Sometimes they buried their treasure.
He wasn’t about to start digging up the yard on the mere chance they might have actually buried something, but Craig was a practical man. If there was something of value here he aimed to find it and make it his.
It took him three days to find it. He’d almost checked it first, but it was so obvious he ruled it out. But since he hadn’t found anything anywhere else, Craig started taking a very close look at the large fireplace in the living room of the house.
He couldn’t be sure if more than one of the bandits had the same idea, or if just the leader hadn’t wanted to risk losing everything if a hiding place was found. But there were several caches, all of them small, except for two. Tapping the bricks, one-by-one, Craig found the small stashes.
Now, it was years after the war; and much of the commerce was still one commodity traded for another. But there was some money changing hands, in the form of gold and silver. So most of what the bandits had taken in their days had been consumed, or traded off for consumables required to sustain life. And there was none of it to be found in those stashes. But the one thing of value that wasn’t consumable was the gold and silver coins that the bandits had taken over their years of operation, that hadn’t been spent for more of the consumables required to keep them alive.
That was what Craig found. A few coins behind one brick. A few more behind another. And so on. He had quite a pile coins when he thought to check under the fire grate. The house had been built not long before the war, and it had many modern construction techniques used to construct it. That included an outside air intake for the fireplace.
When Craig moved the fire grate he saw the grill covering the air vent. Sure enough, when he worked it free, there was an ash covered leather bag pushed well back into the pipe. “No wonder there is so much smoke damage on the face of the fireplace. It hadn’t drawn well with the bag in the pipe. But it had drawn enough cool air to keep the bag from being more than just scorched.
The bag held as much as Craig had taken from the other stashes. On a hunch, Craig went outside and found the inlet to the fireplace air inlet. The cover was already loose. It took only a moment to remove it, reach in, and drag out a leather bag nearly identical to the other one, just as full.
Craig almost stopped there. But he decided to check the fire brick on the inside of the fireplace just as he’d checked the bricks in front and in the hearth. He had no luck and was about to give it up, but he reached up and checked the smoke shelf. There was something there. It wasn’t a bag, and it was far too heavy to be a brick or piece of brick that had fallen down the chimney.
With a hard tug to clear the lip of the smoke shelf, Craig had the object free. It nearly knocked him out when it hit him on the head because he wasn’t fast enough to dodge away from it when it fell. The goose egg he got lasted for days.
But Craig considered it worth it. Like the first leather bag that held as much as he’d already found at the time, the box doubled what he’d already found, including both bags. Perhaps even more than doubled it.
“Why?” Craig wondered aloud. “Why? Why would they keep it up, with this much coin stashed?” He was silent for a while, his head aching from the blow and from the question. And then he spoke to no one again. “It had to be sheer greed for more. And bloodlust to kill and torture that kept them going.”
Craig loaded up the coin, along with the rest of his goods, and headed out, again to the northwest. He still wanted those buffalo. He went back through Limon, on his way to Wyoming, and the destructio
n of the bandits was all the talk.
He’d thought about staying around a day or two, but someone talking about what had happened out on I-70 said, “Yeah. They say it was a cowboy.” The man looked at Craig and continued. “Dressed kinda like you.” Craig decided it was time to hit the trail. The buffalo were waiting.
Craig took it easy through the mountains, giving Denver a wide berth. The Mile High City was now a series of still hot craters. The same nuclear warheads that had destroyed Denver had caused tremendous amounts of fallout east of the city. Though he had a radiation meter, and checked it regularly, Craig circled well east of the city on general principles, unwilling to go into an area of radiation if he didn’t have to.
He made it to Cheyenne without incident. There weren’t many people in the area. Between the mountains that were harsh anyway, and the new, much more severe winters, eking out a living was difficult. There were few remote retreats. Most of the human activity was in and around the cities and small towns, Craig found. It was suggested to him several times that he turn back and head for warmer climes. It didn’t set well with him on general principles.
As he moved north during the summer, his questions about locating some buffalo were met with what could only be called hostility. The buffalo were making a real comeback, from the captive herds that had survived and escaped captivity. Craig was able to develop a real taste for it, as it was more common than beef in the area. It just increased his determination to take a small breeding herd back to Missouri.
When he was east of Casper, near where I-25 turned west, Craig ran into a road block. It was in a canyon that the road went through that was by far the easiest way for Craig to continue. Since he continued to travel with possible ambush in mind, Craig spotted it before he came up on it.
Watching from up high, with the binoculars, Craig began to wonder what was going on. It didn’t seem like those at the roadblock were stopping anyone. They just seemed to be waving people through without even slowing them down.
Though he still hadn’t come up with a reason for the roadblock where it was, Craig went back to his horses, made his way down to the Interstate, and turned Clyde toward the roadblock. He thought he would be waved on through, but as he passed through the narrow opening, six men leaped at him, dragging him down off Clyde, while others scrambled to control the horses.
It took a few seconds to realize that every one of the men was of Native American heritage. He’d never paid much attention to a person’s ethnicity. His mother had taught him it didn’t matter. What a person did was what mattered.
Two men were holding Craig’s arms up behind his back so tightly he had to stand on his tiptoes to avoid the pain. The men made no move to disarm Craig; merely waiting on someone to come up from a vehicle parked a ways down the road.
When the man got to them, with two more men flanking him, Craig was sure they, too, were Native Americans. “So, Cowboy,” said what was obviously the leader of the group. “You finally got here.”
Craig’s eyes widened. Apparently they had been waiting for him. He looked around. The roadblock was being dismantled. Him and only him, perhaps. Craig looked back at the man.
“I’m Chief Joseph. No relation.” The second part was said with a smile.
“Okay, Chief Joseph, you obviously wanted to talk to me. Have I made some transgression? If so, I will willingly apologize and do what I can to correct the matter.”
The Chief’s smile faded. “There will not be another case of white men from the east coming west and taking away our way of life. You have stated many times since you came into this area that you were looking for bison to take back to Missouri. We will not allow that.”
“I can certainly change my mind, then,” Craig said. “Though I must say, I’ve never had any intention of taking away your way of life. I’m not a hunter out here to kill indiscriminately, the way it happened before. I just wanted to take a breeding herd to Missouri to develop a high quality meat source that can handle the winters better than cattle. We wouldn’t be coming out to get more. We’d grow our own.”
“I understand that, Cowboy. But the bison is, and will continue to be, a resource for us.”
“You willing to sell me a few?” Craig asked and went back up on tiptoes when the two men holding him again applied upward pressure on his arms behind his back.
“Are you trying to be funny, Cowboy?”
“No sir,” Craig replied, around a groan. “Bison being sold is still a resource. A good one.”
“Not if you take them back and begin a breeding program, as you said you want to do, and that we have already done.”
“Okay. How about selling me the products, after processing? Or setting up a process center near the Retreat I’m from and bringing the animals yourself. Be easier to do on the hoof than shipping the finished goods. You could control the process the entire way.”
“You are making a business proposal to me while being held captive?”
“Sure. Why not?” Craig said and tried to shrug, but couldn’t.
“You actually think we would do that?”
“Not to repeat myself, but sure, why not?”
The Chief looked around at his men in wonder. Looking back at Craig, he said, “And what do you say we would get out of this? Beads, perhaps?”
Many of the other men around them laughed.
“Gold beads, maybe, if you’re so inclined.”
A man stepped forward and planted a fist in Craig’s belly, just above the gun belt.
“That’s enough of that!” the Chief said, pulling the man back himself before he could strike Craig again. “We don’t abuse prisoners any more. Those days are over.”
Giving Craig a hard look, he continued. “Don’t be facetious, Cowboy. It demeans both of us.”
“Sorry. That was out of line,” Craig replied after he caught his breath. “Of course, what I meant was that the payment could be in gold coin. Or goods that we make. Whatever you want to set up.”
“You really are serious, aren’t you,” the Chief said, his wonderment obvious.
“I am. I’m a horse trader, so to speak. I make all kinds of deals for myself and as lead man for our Retreat.”
“And you would do this as you said? Pay us in some way for bison products. Products that we make.”
“Well, up to a point. Some of the products would probably be finished in some way, into other products, but yes, for the most part.”
“Release him,” the Chief said, waving his hand at the two men holding Craig. They hesitated and the Chief sudden anger was evident in his repeated, “Release him!”
They turned Craig loose and stepped back. Craig worked his shoulders and arms and the man that had hit him quietly warning him, “Make a move I think is threatening and I’ll slit your throat.”
The Chief spoke to the man, angrily, in their native language. Craig didn’t have a clue as to what tribal organization the group belonged to, much less the language. But he heard the disciplinary tone of the Chief’s voice.
“Come sit with me in the Suburban. The air here is chilly, and we have had to go back to herbal medicine. As good as it is, I miss the days of Excedrin for my aches and pains.”
“Look,” Craig said softly, so only the Chief could hear, “I can disarm if it would make you feel better. I’m really not out to hurt anyone.”
“No. Your audacity intrigues me, but I don’t fear you.” Suddenly there was a very modern Glock semi-auto pistol in the Chief’s hand. It was very much like the one in the holster in the small of Craig’s back. “And I can fend for myself if need be.” The pistol disappeared again. Craig couldn’t tell for sure just where it was.
“Okay by me. I prefer negotiating from equal footings.”
“Is that true?” the Chief asked, sliding into one side of the Suburban and motioning Craig into the other. “You are a true horse trader, making trades as much for the sake of the trade than the result of the trade?”
Craig nodded. “Something li
ke that, yeah.”
“As am I. That being the case, make your pitch with the idea that it is indeed possible to do something similar to what you say.”
Craig and Chief Joseph dickered for almost an hour, as the roadblock was removed and the rest of the men with the Chief getting into vehicles to wait as what little traffic there was slowed to try and see what was going on.
Finally, Craig and the Chief struck a bargain, pending Quentin’s approval. “Here’re the frequencies we use,” Craig said, handing Chief Joseph a small piece of paper with the Retreat’s information on it.
“Lots of obstacles in a deal like this,” Craig said and Chief Joseph got a wary look on his face.
“Is this going to be another white man’s loophole to allow you to do pretty much anything but what we just agreed to?” the Chief asked.
Craig looked surprised. “No. Of course not. I just wanted to seal the deal with some earnest money.”
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